The article discusses the importance of the context in the process of automatic translation. The author focuses on two major issues: the lexical database provided by the traditional dictionnaries combined with the data resulting from the analysis based on the object-oriented approach proposed by W. Banyś. A more detailed characterization of the classes of objects around the analysed verb may have the influence on sometimes very subtle differences in the translation. The conclusion is that all this kind of data and the approach adopted in the process of the disambiguation of words are useful to find adequate equivalents in the target language, which the author tries to demonstrate on the example of the French verb descendre. Automatic translation can also show that the modular structure of the approach proposed to the description of words is very specific and doesn’t allow to many possible translations of the word’s concrete use.